In the 1840s Captain John A. Sutter transformed part of the Sacramento Valley Indian population into a work force for his New Helvetia settlement and the surrounding ranchos. Formerly the Nisenan and Miwok population had a hunting and gathering economy that apportioned labor between the sexes and followed a well-defined seasonal round. Formerly their work directly benefited them, providing sustenance, a basis for biological survival and the continuation of traditional lifeways. Suter and his White associates depended on Indian labor and altered the economic and social fabric of Indian communities to make Native people useful to them. Under Mexican law the newcomers had acquired title to huge tracts of land along the Sacramento River and its tributaries, but as late as 1847 there were fewer than 300 Whites in the valley while there were more than 20,000 Indians. With limited White labor resources available, landholders had no choice but to rely on Indians for their labor requirements. Sutter explicitly recognized the value of Indian labor when he advised one of his White overseers on the treatment of Indian livestock thieves. The guilty should receive "severe punishment but he advised against actions that would eliminate the Indian population. He thought it was preferable "for those who have land" that Indians were "saved so much as possible for labor." To that end Sutter and other settlers used the Native population, converting it into a resource at their disposal. The ways that they did so and the effects on the Indian population are the two subjects of this paper.

Most students of California Indians in the 1850s have dwelled on the violence that native people endured at the hands of whites. Tribes that were directly in the path of the Gold Rush were most severely affected because miners forced Indians off of valuable mineral and farm lands and commonly killed those who resisted. Even the most docile natives became victims of infectious diseases; tens of thousands of Indians did not survive the decade. The minority who survived often relied on seasonal labor for white ranchers who seldom had compunctions about exploiting Indian workers. Nevertheless, a few native people were able to exert a measure of control in this new world and became fixtures of daily life in California’s mining and agricultural settlements. Thus California Indians became an impoverished racial minority living on the margins of white society. The Nisenan Indians who occupied rich agricultural and gold-bearing lands in central California shared this sorry fate, yet little is known of the details of Nisenan history in the 1850s. The fullest record of Indian life during the Gold Rush ear exists in the correspondence of the Office of Indian Affairs, but federal agents concentrated their vision on the reservations that they administered where only a minority of the state’s Indians lived. For hundreds of small Indian communities a few scattered documentary references constitute a fragmentary record of their adjustments to the new conditions that beset them. Dispersed among the farms and towns of the Sacramento Valley, Nisenans were out of the view of federal Indian agents, so official records seldom mentioned them. As a result, rare documents that describe the Nisenans-like the two John A. Sutter letters printed with this essay-expand our understanding of Indian adaptations to white society and of how farmers and bureaucrats dealt with Indian workers.